Talk:Merry England/Archive 1

Archive 1

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More broadly beyond the merely mass sentimental vision of people who live in commuter estates with pseudo-cottage additions that take up their nine foot sqaure garden anyway current believers can be divided ideologically between left and right. The right-wing actually believe that the Murdoch driven or inspired right-wing hacks of the current day press are sincere when they invoke village green cricket matches, fixed term sentancing and lowering the daily train fare to Margate to a 'reasonable' 500 pounds. They think they are participants on the Pilgrimage of Grace when they read some hack poking fun at female lesbian vicars who believe that transcribed Lionel Ritchie songs make a fairly good theology. In reality their hypocritcal invocation of the golden past is really the desire to turn Britain into a neo-colonial and somewhat colder and less sunny version of a mix of Queensland and Florida. This is the current chief conservative use of the idea of Merry England.

The chief aim of those manipulating little England and Merry England sentiment is to try to stop Britain entering into its ancient true Merry England heritage of closer interconnection with Western Europe. G. K. Chesteron pointed out a long time ago that Western Europe is the ultimate destination of Merry Engalnd - not little England. The neo-conservative manipulators of the idea of Merry England want to see a country dominated by a class of neo-cons emulating the mores of the elite of the sun-belt of the USA. There is no room for a genuine Merry England in this agenda.

The current left wing version is even worse, insofar as it hysterically rejects as neo-fascism any compromise with those who point out that villages, rural life, stable and long-term values are of necessity based on large families, majority hetrosexuality, boring long hard days indispersed with often boring, childish but also genuinely traditional festivals (like a family Christmas (or should I say Ephiphany) cheese rolling, very bloody football matches and I'm afraid 3 hour church services with often not that well-done music or other goings on.

There has still been a rapid and ongoing depopulation of rural Western Europe even with the subsidies and the relatively better opportunities they have had there to live off the land and enjoy a genuinely complex local life while having access to infrastrucure that makes present day England third world by comparision. This points out that most people now (as in the Middle Ages when they got half a chance) prefer plastic food, banal repetitive mass entertainment, and an otherwise shallow sentiment driven existence. Human nature inevitably draws most people (when they have the choice) to choose an almost morbid self-absorbtion in life draining routines which substitute for the life of considered reflection and self-awareness that comes from long hard days of long hard work and long hard play lived out in the countryside.

If this were not so in the days of Merry England then why were so many town dwellers the first to take up lifestyles, attitudes and beliefs such as the self-absorbed individualism of Wycliffism, Protestantism and Puritanism? Or later on adopt the really quite shallow lifestyles and attitudes which the genius of the great Jacobean dramatists and the retailers of stories of urban life in 16th, 17th and 18th century England depict? Shakespeare, Marlowe, Congreve, Sheridan, and Patmore often hide from us, due to their creative genuius, the actual grubby reality that really lay behind the disease, the street gangs, the regular rioting, the concentrated exposure to fraud, injustice and the constant upheaval and change which generated the Merry England myth (in its later forms) to help all this go away.

Merry England is just as badly served by the post Tolkein inspired generation- the children of the flower children or children of those who weren't flower children but who actually still think rock and pop music has something to say - other than buy me and make several thousand ageing band members and a few hundred others added to their ranks every year very happy people.

Merry England is normally not explicitly invoked by the children of the disapointed left but it is still there lurking as an impromptu muffler bandage on their 1978 Volkswagon with its fake stick on labels proclaiming this newer generation's pose-views of saying they support 'alternative lifestyles'. Or Merry England is one of the occasionally played CD's in the selector pile in the 1998 Audi of the employed version of animal liberationists, anti-nuclear activists, by-pass activists, anti-hunt activists, etc.,. Remember good old Tom Good of the Good Life? He put on a Vaughn Williams record when he wanted to really get close to Merry England.

Merry England's ultimate misuse is in the form of some updated ideology ridden version shorn of conservative resonanace lurking behind those who just will not admit that mass production of the life drained vegetables they force down your throat if you go over to their 'share house' (or their half million pound rabbit hutch with views over the River) for a 'roast' is just as bad really as eating meat produced by factory farming. Mass urban lifestyles of any kind require some compromise with Merry England's ultimate vision and so what -thats just being realistic. Realistic compromise is required over all the various agendas of left, right, centre, alternative, radical eco, and radical, neo-con or even just sitting waiting for the gyro and/or the whole range of other approaches -good, bad and neutral we now have to pretend we tolerate. (All of us don't tolerate something)

Merry England requires lots of drinking of good honest ale, mead and cider (and if in the appropriate region additional distilled drinks and sausage meat produced hopefully away from the ken of the bureaucrats and tax persons). It requires lots of other things done in lots of contexts not associated with the pathetic mass-cultural invocation of the avante-garde that 'young'and 'free' people have been told is the only way they can really enjoy life - ever since the bored and exploitative upper middle class (people like Shelley) began to tell them this was so.

Maybe, just maybe something of the actual way of life that needs to be led to experience Merry England will be discovered by the baby boom generation once they actually retire full-time to their retirement house or flat. Merry England will appear almost in fulfillment of Chesterton's prophecy of Little England's vanishing by the sheer force of the better way of 'living' life Catholic Europe has always experienced.

So that Merry England will finally germinate as an idea within the rather tawdry villas and flats along the Mediterranean. (Hopefully yours does have several large balconies that really almost are 'terraces'). Merry England might flower among the retired English in France, Ireland or even some part of rural England or even in a half way decent and still fairly green suburb on an English urban fringe. These genuinely slowed down people might begin to draw their children and grandchildren away from the nightmare Puritan vision - which we English spawned when we created English speaking North America. A vision which is as equally un-Merry England in its various alternative visions- 'lets be secular' or 'lets be nice' or 'lets be naughty' or 'lets be Godly' and/or 'lets be anything we want to be.'

Merge/Delete/...

• Merry England. Ideological rant. RickK 01:46, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
  • While much of this stuff may be redundant to Deep England, a page that may have POV issues itself, I don't think it's irreformable. In fact, it might be preferable to have the Deep England material at Merry England, especially since, at least outside of the UK, few have heard the phrase "Deep England," but most everybody knows what kind of nostalgia is meant by "Merry England." -- IHCOYC 16:50, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
  • Ideological rant??? It sounds to me like a myth not unlike Arcadia, and it may be related to the "despise of court, praise of village" which is one of the important themes in 16-17th century literature. It would not be surprising if English romantic authors in the 19th century had used this myth... It seems consistent with the little I know about literature. Do not delete. -- Miguel
    • But it should be "Merrie" England. Deb 22:47, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)